The story of a seed saver

Through the two recent blizzards, I’ve been riding light rail to work and enjoying “Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver,” by Diane Ott Whealy, my nose stuck deep into its ivory, photo-sprinkled pages.

"Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver," by Diane Ott Whealy

Seed-saving used to seem the high holy of garden geekdom, and even after a long how-to session at Abbondanza Organic Seeds & Produce, more trouble than I had time for. Then I tasted a tomato from a farmer’s market that I just had to have more of, and learned how easy it is to save tomato seeds because of how the plants pollinate. For many plants, though, it’s not easy to save seeds that you can be sure will produce another generation that’s like their parents.

But it is essential. If you’re reading this, you probably are hip to the world of flavor and variety in, say, an heirloom tomato. You might have even read one of Amy Goldman’s wonderful books on heirloom tomatoes, melons, or squash.

Heirloom vegetable seeds don’t just produce themselves. They have to be planted, kept pure, and then specially harvested and treated. The people who do this work are keeping history and tradition alive, preserving our food supply’s genetic diversity, and its beauty, and its flavor.

Today, if the varieties your grandparents and great-grandparents grew are available, you can get them in large part thanks to people like Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy, who founded what was to grow into Seed Savers Exchange back in the 1970s, when her grandfather bequeathed some special morning glory and tomato seeds. (Kent, from Kansas, and Diane, from Iowa, actually met here in Colorado in Estes Park).

“Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver” tells the story of SSE’s genesis: 29 gardeners who sent 25 cents and a large envelope to the “True Seed Exchange” in northern Missouri. Those gardeners got a six-page publication listing seed other gardeners were willing to share. The year after that, the group was 142 people and the seed listing was rolled out on a mimeograph machine.

Soon after, Seed Savers Exchange established itself as a national non-profit. Since then, its membership has grown to more than 13,000; it has permanent grounds at Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, with an orchard of hundreds of heirloom apple trees and rare-breed cattle. The annual yearbook, full of thousands of people willing to share heirloom seed, lands with a big “thup” in a mailbox, complete with seed descriptions and contact information. Maine gardening guru Eliot Coleman speaks at the farm’s annual campout.

It wasn’t easy. Diane Ott Whealy’s memoir, which reads like a story she’d tell you if you sat next to her at a big Iowa family reunion, is frank about what it took to build an institution that both she and her then-husband believed in, to the point of going without health insurance for themselves. They had day jobs and often night jobs for many years while devoting every spare moment to Seed Savers. The bean seeds — numbering in the thousands, that a collector entrusted to them — lived in their basement.

Their five children got tired of hearing them talk about seed saving. In fact, the couple envisioned Heritage Farm — a permanent place to anchor their mission — on a country drive when the kids had challenged them them not to bring up seeds the entire time. They had given this dream 15 years of their lives and all of their energy when, in 1990, Kent Whealy was given a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. It meant that they could, for the first time in their married lives, buy a safe car.

This is how it all happened: piles of letters on a desk; oak cases of bean seeds in their basement; farmers and gardeners sharing knowledge, stories, recipes. One farmer responded to a radio interview with Kent and Diane and wrote in to say he had seeds for a melon they’d been searching for. The melon was Moon & Stars, a beautiful, yellow-fleshed melon with a golden blob and smaller golden speckles. It’s that melon variety that Judith Ann Griffith illustrates on the book’s jacket, surrounded by its foliage, bedecked with a speckled Eastern tiger salamander.

It’s a beautiful book that’s both stylish and homey; a story of planting a seed, believing in its rightness, and giving it all that you have.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.